Time Periods

TIME PERIODS

Judeochristian theology claims that the universe was created in six days. Science says it took billions of years. They can't both be right. Which one is wrong?

Is Religion Wrong?
Let's examine the religious argument first. At the end of the creation story, the Bible says:
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning — the sixth day. Genesis 1:31
NIV
The translation is accurate; in the original Hebrew, that last word is “yom”, which means “day”.
But perhaps this is not the whole truth. Maybe the Bible intends for this to be metaphorical. Perhaps the real story is so complicated tha there's no way to explain it so that people could understand it at the time it was originally read, the author might have chosen to use a much simpler story that is approximately analagous. For example, suppose your six-year-old child asks you why sugar disappears when you put it in water. An accurate explanation can be found at Yahoo Answers: “Table sugar dissolves in water because when a sucrose molecule breaks from the sugar crystal, it is immediately surrounded by water molecules. The sucrose has hydroxyl groups that have a slight negative charge. The positive charge of the oxygen found in the water molecule binds with the sugar. As the hydration shell forms around the sucrose molecule, the molecule is shielded from other sugar molecules so the sugar crystal does not reform.” But you wouldn't say this to the child, because he wouldn't understand. Instead, you might give him a much simpler, but less accurate answer like, “The sugar breaks up into extremely tiny pieces, and they mix with the water like different colors of jellybeans at the candy store.” This is basically correct, except for one minor detail: The reason that the jellybeans don't separate into the different colors is very different from the reason that the sugar doesn't separate from the water. It's not as if the red jellybeans have a “slight negative charge”.
Now look at the book of Revelation, which predicts events that have not yet occurred.
To him was given a large sword. Revelation 6:4z
NIV
They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth. Revelation 6:8z
NIV
... the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. Revelation 13:14z
NIV
It's hard to believe that future events would involve swords. I find it easier to believe that, instead of trying to describe guns and bombs, the Bible chose to use swords as a simpler metaphor.
So then what is the true explanation for the amount of time it took to create the universe? Well, I can only guess. But it might have something to do with the fact that God is outside of time. Time doesn't exist from God's point of view. Time is an imaginary concept that people made up to help them understand the universe. It is very difficult for people to imagine a universe without time. If the author of the Bible tried to explain it, it would probably take many pages, nearly all of the readers would get totally confused, and the main points that the author wants us to learn from the creation story wouldn't be very clear at all. (If you're interested, I have tried to explain what a universe without time might look like.)

Is Science Wrong?
Now let's look at the scientific argument. According to science, the universe is expanding, and according to the formulas, if you extrapolate backwards in time for about 14 billion years, the entire universe gets compressed into an infinitely tiny ball. But the assumption that the universe was ever that small might be wrong. Perhaps the universe was extremely large when it first came into existence. This would violate the theory that it's impossible for nothing to turn into something, but isn't that theory based on the universe that Einstein was analyzing? His theory of the conservation of mass-energy may have been true since the early 1900s. But there's no way to prove that it was always true. It may be difficult to imagine nothing turning into something, but isn't an infinitely tiny universe also a strange concept?
Still, Judeo-Christian theology claims that the universe is less than 6000 years old, but fossils have been discovered that are millions of years old. The reason that science claims they are that old is that, when an animal dies, the carbon in it starts decaying at a rate that conforms to a simple formula. This formula has been shown to be very accurate many many times over periods of time since the carbon dating theory was proposed. But that's less than a hundred years. Maybe it becomes less accurate as the time period is increased. The inaccuracy over a hundred years might be too small to measure, but when you try it on things that are thousands of years old, the error might be in the millions. This idea is similar to the way that Newton's laws of motion are very accurate for things that move at hundreds of miles per hour, but Einstein discovered that the accuracy decreases as the speed increases, and that the error is huge for things moving at 100 million miles per second.
One more idea: Einstein discovered that time is relative. If there was a meteor accelerating away from the Earth at a very rapid rate, then one day on the asteroid could have been millions of years on the Earth.


References

Notes